Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

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I think, in hindsight, it will turn out to have been an exceptionally good call to retain Greenland.

They have an interesting setup - there is no land ownership other than by the state, and you can only get permission to build by winning a lottery. There are minor exceptions for building small hunting cabins in the fjords, but this is negligible. The reason is to prevent private ownership from hindering possible opportunities for the state in the future.

So, why a good call?

Climate change.

1) Greenland has vast reserves of fresh water. This resource will become increasingly valuable as clean fresh water grows scarcer globally.

2) agriculture and habitation. If Greenland continues to melt, in centuries to come there will be vast planes of glacial till - good, fertile land. As the climate warms, the arctic waste will potentially become far more hospitable than (dis)temperate latitudes.

3) strategic dominance. The Arctic is going to be exceedingly important as ice clears for both transportation and resource extraction. Greenland has vast untapped mineral reserves, never mind the territorial waters.

> Greenland has vast untapped mineral reserves

So does Northwest Canada, which is much nearer to well-maintained infrastructure for actually moving those resources to places that want them. Siberia is chock-full of places where the mining industries shut down not because they ran out of things to mine but because it was no longer feasible to do so once the subsidies stopped.

Greenland may have mineral resources, but they are nowhere near the top of untapped resources when sorted by economic exploitation abilities.

So far Greenland is a relatively poor and miserable place, with a population of only 56,674.

Comparatively, Alaska offers a much better role model for arctic governance.

Alaska is much warmer. Only a few sheltered coastal bays on Greenland can sustain any trees at all. Meanwhile, Sitka and Ketchikan often enjoy snowless winters. This is due, I believe, to the Aleutian ridge blocking the transport of cold water from the Arctic (contrast with the Labrador current).

Don't you think using two points along the narrow strip of land at the southwestern tip of Alaska as indicative of the overall Alaskan climate is just a wee bit dishonest?

They are apparently the 4th and 5th largest cities in the state, so not a terrible example [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Alaska

They're also unreachable by road from the Alaska "mainland".

Anyway, however you think about the state, those cities are clearly not part of the Arctic.

Indeed. Also consider that vikings managed to colonise Iceland but not Greenland.

But they did colonise Greenland. They were there for 500 years.

And Greenland is still Danish, so the decendants of the vikings did manage to hold on to it, even after their settlements died out, they came back.

Well, they had a struggling little outpost. Greenland is vast.

Edit: i'm wrong, they did spread out some.

> miserable place

How are you assessing that?

I lived there for 5 years.

One interesting thing about Greenland is that climate change is making it increasingly rich in a resource that’s rapidly getting scarce elsewhere on the planet: sand. To be precise, the sort of sand that’s useful for making concrete and asphalt.

quality sand is incredibly abundant and cheap everywhere I lived. It wouldn't be economically feasible to export sand from Greenland.

Maybe everywhere you have lived. Meanwhile, they're already exporting sand from Australia to places like Saudi Arabia.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/01/climate/green...

Fresh water literally falls from the sky unless you live in a desert. I question the value of exporting water from Greenland.

large, and very populated, parts of the world rely on slow ice-melt from winter snows on mountains (California, India). Global warming may mean that that slow-ice-melt won't be so slow any more, and that can mean possibly flooding followed by drought.

It even falls in the desert some times, there’s just not features to retain it.

1. It’s cheaper to desalinate sea water than transport it in ships.

2. You don’t need land for agriculture. Plenty of crops can grow in water.

3. Greenland has lots of gold. That’s about it.

How much of that water is glacial though and will be gone when Greenland melts?

Forget the melting - how do you even make any use of glacial fresh water? You're not going to start growing wheat in Greenland, that's for sure, so you're not getting much use out of it on the spot. Move it elsewhere? No one's ever accomplished the 'tow an iceberg to sell it' thing before (and icebergs are much more convenient than glaciers), and if they do, it'll be a relatively tiny industry since it has to compete with stuff like reverse osmosis.

> You're not going to start growing wheat in Greenland

Why not? People grow wheat right now at the same longitude in Finland, all you need is for it to get a bit warmer.

soil, or the lack thereof.

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